Posted Dec. 25, 2013, 9:10 am

Beverly Cohn / Editor-At-Large

Do you have the holiday blues? Feeling blah? Hate shopping? Hate
being nice to relatives you really don’t like? Are you wishing you could
go to sleep and when you wake up, all the “festivities” are over? Well,
be sad no more as The Second City’s “A Christmas Carol – Twist Your
Dickens!” on stage at the Kirk Douglas Theatre is the perfect antidote
to the holiday tradition condition.

Written by Peter Gwinn and Bobby Mort, under the impeccable direction
by Marc Warzecha, fasten your seat belts for non-stop, mostly
irreverent, fractured version of Dickens’ classic tale. It should be
noted that before the audience was let into the theatre, they were
handed strips of red or green construction paper and were instructed to
write the most awful thing they’ve ever done. As we found out later on,
this was an important, riotous element to spring upon the unsuspecting
audience.

With beautiful Victorian sets by Scenic Designer Tom Buderwitz, the
shenanigans begin with a mask-wearing barbershop quartet singing the
exposition in comical verse immediately followed by all hell breaking
loose. It’s Christmas Eve. The weather is freezing, with a biting cold,
chilling wind. Ebenezer Scrooge has lined up several heaters to keep him
warm, with none for his devoted, overworked, freezing clerk, who
heartbreakingly plays the most abused Bob Cratchit, wonderfully brought
to life by Ithamar Enriquez, who appears in an assortment of other
characters. He is appropriately obsequious and is forced to work on
Christmas Eve. Scrooge, in an act of “kindness,” generously “gifts” his
clerk with a day off on Christmas Day.

Ron West’s Ebenezer Scrooge is about as evil and nasty as you can get
turning away an assortment of people asking for charitable
contributions to provide Christmas dinners for the needy, which he
summarily turns down. He scowls saying, “It’s a poor excuse for picking a
man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December. Devoid of any holiday
spirit, he abruptly turns down having dinner with his nephew referring
to Christmas as “humbug,” adding that, “I’m not coming to a stupid ass
party filled with stupid-ass people.”

Scrooge has collected a bucket full of coins, which he dumps on the
floor, snarling that “It was like taking candy from a baby who is
stupid” or “Good hearted people are gullible.” His office is across the
street from an orphanage, which is short of food and Scrooge delights in
having his lunch near the window so that “The orphans can what watch me
eat.” Really, how mean can he get? But wait. Old Scrooge is about to
get his comeuppance and in short order, he experiences the nightmares of
being visited by a variety of ghosts, including his deceased business
partner Jacob Marley, “scarily” played by Joe Liss, as well as Frank
Caeti’s hilarious “The Ghost of Christmas Past,” and “The Ghost of
Christmas Present” played by a very amusing Brendan Jennings. This
gifted ensemble, with crack timing, skillfully transitions into
different characters with very distinct characterizations both vocally
and physically.

Amanda Black as the crippled Tiny Tim was comically spot on with her
uttering such Pollyannaish lines as “The sun peeked through the soot for
a few minutes.” A most talented, amusing Jaime Moyer plays Mrs.
Cratchit, along with other delightful characters. No subject was
satirically off limits and included the actors’ heads poking through cut
outs of some of the Peanuts characters including Charlie Brown, Lucy,
Snoopy, and Linus who argued about the ending of “A Charlie Brown
Christmas.”

One very amusing element is that every once in a while one of the
actors sitting in the audience would interrupt the proceedings to point
out to the actor Ron West/Scrooge that they are mixing periods as there
were “No vertical file cabinets in the nineteenth century or barbershop
quartets.” These interruptions are scattered throughout the evening,
causing the audience, to erupt in laughter that was continuous
throughout the entire production. There are so many funny scenes
including the spoof on Oliver Twist where the orphans have formed Local
101, a union that is demanding more and better food, and not just the
junk they’re being fed. Batman makes an appearance in protest against
Charles Dickens.

Now, remember that audience members were asked to list their worst
offenses and it’s at this point along comes “The Ghost of Jacob Marley”
wearing a garland of the notes written by audience members and he begins
to read some of the sins. The audience howled as confessions were read:
“I took the last piece of my son’s candy,” or “I blinded a parakeet
with a laser printer,” or “I copied off of a kid’s test and wound up
failing because he was stupider than me,” or “I once had twenty hookers
in Malaysia,” or “I was making love on the floor to the husband of a
friend when we heard his wife’s voice coming down the hall and the key
inserted into the lock. We froze. Luckily he had the office locks
changed and her key didn’t fit.”

Experiencing all his ghastly, ghostly visitations, Scrooge becomes
graphically aware of the errors of his mean ways and transitions into a
nice guy, accepting his nephew’s dinner invitation, donating money to
charities and everyone lives happily ever after, with the hilarious
theatrical adventure culminating in an audience sing-along.

One of the characters asks “Is this heaven?” Another replies: It
can’t be. It’s Culver City.” So, given that it’s easier to get to Culver
City than heaven (depending on traffic, heaven might be easier). you
owe it to yourself to jump into your buggy and trot over to the Kirk
Douglas Theatre where you are assured of washing away any of those
holiday blahs.